ENCTR Dev Blog #3 — A Quick Update
This dev blog will focus on summarizing the status of v2 ENCTR to provide clarity to the entire community, and a variety of topics cleared up. As always, any features or implementations are subject to change.
I’ve chosen some important talking points, and will be addressing them in parts throughout the article. Feel free to scroll to whichever seems relevant to your concerns.
Part 1: When Launch
I know most of you won’t scroll past this section, so I’ll address it first.
We’re slowly updating some wordage across our socials and website to address this, but the official pre-sale for v2 ENCTR is looking to be slightly pushed back to January 2022.
“But why?”, you might ask.
Let me introduce you to THE LAUNCHPAD. The secret sauce for cryptocurrency project validation. Currently, almost all reputable launchpads are being bombarded with NFT and Metaverse projects, and I’d say maybe 90% of them have gone as far as completely derailing their application processes. That being said, we are in works with a couple such as Unicrypt and DAO Maker, but the processes of moving forward have taken much more time than we anticipated.
We’ve made an internal decision that for the success of the project, we will be greenlighting v2 ENCTR when our launchpad is ready.
Everything else for the launch is setup and ready to go. We’ve got some really exciting marketing plans and cool content to release, but it’s necessary to give the project the time it needs to launch correctly.
We encourage everyone to stay active in our Telegram and across all social media, and to please share any interesting resources or connections that might be useful to the project. We see this extended downtime as a time to grow as developers and creators, and further solidify ourselves in the crypto space for the long-term.
Part 2: Shifting The Brand
We are shifting the Encountr brand slightly away from our wagering module, and a bit more towards a wider encompassing dEsports project.
This doesn’t mean that our wagering module (Battlescape) is going anywhere (we’re actually quite excited for its release). We noticed that a large portion of newcomers to the project would first ask about what separates ENCTR from “Insert Gambling Token Here” project, and really that’s just an inevitable consequence of our content writing. I think it’s fair to say that our project has been somewhat shaky over the last 8 months, and we put just a bit too much emphasis on Battlescape. On the older website versions, it was the first thing you see.
“Battlescape” “Wager Your Tokens”, etc.
The primary content of the project across our website and social media platforms was strictly mentioning wagering, and I believe that is a hole that needs patching up.
Although the Battlescape module is the first feature, and an important one, we are shifting our branding and marketing to be the official dEsports gaming token, with extra emphasis on the suite of features and our vision for it.
It’s important for us to ensure that the Encountr App is viewed as an in-progress suite of features, rather than just a wagering app. This will likely be an on-going challenge as Battlescape will be the only module in the short term (2–3 months).
Part 3: Marketing Plans
I’m personally really excited to introduce some of our new marketing plans. Starting right at the pre-sale, we’ll be setting up our referral system through a third party service to provide a plethora of rewards. Referrals are a really efficient way to grow a community, and we also want the rewards to be of something valuable. With this new system, we’ll be able to grow our social accounts and Discord/Telegram groups in a pretty passive way, and provide interesting drops for active members.
Starting off, we’ll likely pay out of pocket for these referral giveaways, and then transition to utilizing our 2% Community pool (as stated in the new ENCTR Lite Paper).
Eventually it would be nice to incorporate some kind of referral system into the app itself, and I think it’d be possible within Q1 or Q2 of 2022. Seeing as our notification system within the app is already developed and tested, we could implement a reward system that assigns your personal identifier with a special code.
Example:
1. Connect your wallet to the ENCTR App and get assigned your personal referral code.
2. Have a friend connect their wallet to the ENCTR App.
3. Send them your personal code, and you both earn X amount of ENCTR.
This kind of reward system is really exciting to think about, because in reality, the blockchain provides a plethora of new ways to incentivize and reward action. We’ll provide more details for our referral system closer to pre-sale, inside our Telegram group.
We’re also working with several crypto marketing teams in assembling our launch campaigns. There’s alot of options out there, and comparing costs and turnaround efficiency are important factors to consider. We want to allocate our marketing funds into a team that understands the project, and understands our demographic and market reach.
Part 4: Extra Stuff
ENCTR + Metaverse
Everyone’s talking about the metaverse. We see the potential in the space, and its crossovers with Esports, so I’d like to address it here.
The metaverse is a giant cooperative between all the online platforms out there. Through accepting that consumers are screening and engaging brands and content across platforms simultaneously, there is a large potential for Esports brands to open their markets so gamers and other enthusiasts can continue their engagement when going between platforms, acting almost as an influencer in the space.
Video games don’t operate similar to a metaverse because there isn’t a financial incentive to do so yet. When blockchain or third-party services allow the games to “speak” to each other, then these games might begin to connect to the metaverse. Blockchain technology has the potential to empower Esports in the metaverse.
It’s important to note that Steam recently blocked all blockchain games from the store, so I think there’s a ways to go in that regard. There’s really only a small amount of AAA developers and smaller sub-companies that are participating in the metaverse and blockchain games.
Game developers don’t really see the current consumer demands right now. The games are made as standalone entities. They don’t build them in a way that, whatever is happening inside the game, is interacting with the real world.
My hope is that Encountr can interact with the metaverse in some way, whether it’s featuring blockchain games in a competitive way, or building a suite of features that can interact with these metaverse games for a cross-experience.
That’s all I really wanted to discuss today. Hopefully this article provides some clarity on launch, and we’re projecting it’s release for January 2022. The Battlescape will release with the app shortly after token launch. That much isn’t changing.
Like I iterated above, pretty much all of the content and app experience is ready-to-go. Our launchpad is the ignition.
